By Clint C. Wilson II and Felix Gutierrez, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1995. 290 pp. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper "Race, Multiculturalism, and the Media" reads like a textbook: that is both its strength and its weakness.
It is a strength because it fills an important vacuum in social science and humanities curricula: there are few textbooks which deal systematically with the relationship between race, culture and media. The authors Clint C. Wilson II, an associate professor of journalism at Howard University, and Felix F. Gutierrez, vice president and executive director of the Freedom Forum Pacific Coast Center, are to be congratulated for their contribution to this important area of scholarship.
It is also, however, a weakness, since textbooks, by their very nature, are poorly equipped to tackle controversial social issues. And there are few issues as controversial in American society as race and. media.
While the authors do an excellent job of examining the damage that newspapers, movies and television do with respect to people of color, they fail to note that their own chosen medium (i.e., books) are equally guilty in this regard. It is true not only for political treatises such as "The Bell Curve;" it is also true of textbook authors who, generally, cannot lay claim to the excuses used by the more commercially dependent authors.
Rightly or wrongly, textbooks are held to a higher standard of truth and accuracy than are other types of books and most other media. Aside from the inevitable confrontation with Goddel's Theorem, which posits that a system (or industry) may criticize others but is limited in its ability to criticize itself, "Race, Multiculturalism, and the Media" provides important insights into the workings of American mass media.These insights are presented to the reader in the form of I I chapters divided neatly into four parts, including an extensive introduction and conclusion. A list of suggested readings, end-of-chapter notes and an index (always welcome) complete the well-organized 275-page volume.
